Phew, really difficult bit here. I translate δίκαν here simple 'like' or 'in the manner of'. I'm sure we've already encountered this use of δίκαν in Agamemnon before. What I'm unsure about is the grammatical terminology - what would you call this, adverbial usage, accusative of respect or what?

ἄνευ λύρας means joyless - the lyre was a joyful instrument, we a told by commentators, as dirges were accompanied by the flute. This is the sort of thing that is impossible to understand without a commentary or translation. But it's also the sort of thing I feel I learn something new looking up - unlike when I tried to make sense out of the mumbo jumbo at 984-7, comparing different editor's educated guesses.

οὐ τὸ πᾶν ἔχων ἐλπίδος φίλον θράσος. 'not having all [adverbial τὸ πᾶν] the agreeable confidence of hope', says R-T. But I prefer Sommerstein/Loeb translating ἐλπίδος φίλον θράσος as 'natural confident hope'. I believe φίλον has the common Homeric sense here, 'own' hence 'natural'. φίλον has a similar meaning also at 983.

ἄνευ λύρας means joyless - the lyre was a joyful instrument, we a told by commentators, as dirges were accompanied by the flute. This is the sort of thing that is impossible to understand without a commentary or translation. But it's also the sort of thing I feel I learn something new looking up

Paul,

I agree without a commentary you wouldn't get it. D-P has "gloomy". I have translations from Edith Hamilton 1937 - C. Collard 2003 (incl. Lattimore, McNeice, Fagles) none of them unpack the metaphor which leaves me wondering if there is a need to unpack it. Perhaps θρῆνος provides the needed semantic coloring but on the other hand ὑμνῳδεῖ seems to head in different direction. The mention of the Ἐρινύος certainly doesn't lend itself to sing a hymn or song of praise, Pl.Lg.682a, LXX 1 Ch. 25.6: which is why LSJ adds a note on our passage: generally, sing, θρῆνον A.Ag.990 (lyr.). H. W. Smyth follows the pattern with the lyreless dirge of the avenging spirit.

I just checked the county library and put half a dozen Agamemnon books, different translations, on hold. Also a lecture series by Elizabeth Vandiver Ph.D. which looks interesting. I generally check C. Collard first and cross check him against Lattimore. Edith Hamilton is fun to read since I have a personal interest in the 1920s and 1930s. Hamilton certainly wasn't a member of "the lost generation" and don't suspect she spent much time at Cafes in Paris in the 1920s. Fagles is a little bit too flamboyant to be useful as an English crib.

Maybe ὑμνῳδεῖ has a connotation of joy and this is a wordplay, like a "joyless celebration". Of course it's easy to make this an exception like LSJ does and say it means "generally, sing".

For translations, I look almost only at the Loeb now. I have also Fagles but my impression is same as yours, it's not much help for the Greek. I also have a Finnish translation from the library by someone called Kirsti Simonsuuri, which is ok, but a bit too free to be useful as a crib. Generally speaking, we are not very well served with translations of classical texts, so I rather read them in English or sometimes French.

I've only read Agamemnon in Hebrew once for a university course.
All of the seven extant Aeschylus' plays were translated to a metric,
poetic Hebrew by Shlomo (=Solomon) Dikman. I have an old paperback edition
of his translation to Sophocles' Antigone, which is too ornate for my taste (I have
the same quibble of Tshernechovsky's Illiad & Odyssey translations, although they are
unmatched in their thorough meticulousness).

Even if I did have the xerox copy I had of his translation, I doubt I'd be able to keep up with
you guys. Great to see you keep it going though.

I'm wondering if the meaning and reference of ἐλπίδος is different on 999 than above. The use of ἐλπίδος for an expectation of doom might be somewhat of a shock to someone steeped in NT Greek where ἐλπίδος positive.

The larger idioms in 998-1000 also seem somewhat opaque. There is no subject for πεσεῖν. ψύθη is an argument of some sort with πεσεῖν if we read πεσεῖν like a copula "it falls false" think of throwing a coin which comes up true or false. This is paraphrased with ἐς τὸ μὴ τελεσφόρον "it doesn't happen" or "it does not come to fruition." A curious collection of oddities.

D-P say that κέαρ is in apposition to σπλάγχνα which takes care of what looked to me like a stray word. There is a lot lexical focus in this part of the chorus on words in the mental, spiritual, emotional semantic domains: θυμός, σπλάγχνα, φρεσὶν, κέαρ, θράσος, ἐλπίδος, νόσος. This contributes to textual cohesion or what Halliday & Hasan (1976) called texture.

A new metaphor introduced with ἔπαισεν ἄφαντον ἕρμα, human fate is like a ship that sails into a hidden reef ... the following lines are difficult, not sure what to make of χρημάτων κτησίων something like "ones valuable possessions" but the LSJ gloss on κτησίων belonging to property leaves me in a fog. How can χρημάτων (goods, property treasures, heirlooms) be modified by belonging to property?

ὄκνος (alarm, fear) throwing cargo overboard using a sling σφενδόνας in good measure ἀπ’ εὐμέτρου; not throwing out everything or anything just what is needed to save the ship. In the following lines the ship becomes a house which is in danger of sinking because it is overfull of what?.

A new metaphor introduced with ἔπαισεν ἄφαντον ἕρμα, human fate is like a ship that sails into a hidden reef ... the following lines are difficult, not sure what to make of χρημάτων κτησίων something like "ones valuable possessions" but the LSJ gloss on κτησίων belonging to property leaves me in a fog. How can χρημάτων (goods, property treasures, heirlooms) be modified by belonging to property?

ὄκνος (alarm, fear) throwing cargo overboard using a sling σφενδόνας in good measure ἀπ’ εὐμέτρου; not throwing out everything or anything just what is needed to save the ship. In the following lines the ship becomes a house which is in danger of sinking because it is overfull of what?.

Smyth noted that Aeschylus had confused between the metaphor and the thing it symbolized
with the insertion of δόμος here.

A new metaphor introduced with ἔπαισεν ἄφαντον ἕρμα, human fate is like a ship that sails into a hidden reef ... the following lines are difficult, not sure what to make of χρημάτων κτησίων something like "ones valuable possessions" but the LSJ gloss on κτησίων belonging to property leaves me in a fog. How can χρημάτων (goods, property treasures, heirlooms) be modified by belonging to property?

ὄκνος (alarm, fear) throwing cargo overboard using a sling σφενδόνας in good measure ἀπ’ εὐμέτρου; not throwing out everything or anything just what is needed to save the ship. In the following lines the ship becomes a house which is in danger of sinking because it is overfull of what?.

Smyth noted that Aeschylus had confused between the metaphor and the thing it symbolized
with the insertion of δόμος here.

Thank you Nate for drawing my attention to the Notes by Smith which I didn't know about. Here is the note you referenced:

The house of Agamemnon, full of calamity, is likened to an overloaded ship, which will founder if some part of its freight is not jettisoned. By confusion of the symbol and the thing signified, δόμος is boldly said to “sink its hull.”

I wonder if the expression σφενδόνας ἀπ’ εὐμέτρου is another somewhat convoluted metaphor. The proper measure of the sling referring not to the sling itself but to the measure of what is thrown overboard, i.e., not all the cargo but just enough cargo. It would be a very indirect way of saying this but Aeschylus is capable of oblique expression. This would seem to make sense of what immediately follows about the house being filled to overflowing and the whole house not sinking.

Not sure what is pictured as being thrown overboard, the possessions or the πημονᾶς (suffering, misery, calamity, woe). Smyth's note quoted above appears to support πημονᾶς.

C. S. Bartholomew wrote:D-P say that κέαρ is in apposition to σπλάγχνα which takes care of what looked to me like a stray word. There is a lot lexical focus in this part of the chorus on words in the mental, spiritual, emotional semantic domains: θυμός, σπλάγχνα, φρεσὶν, κέαρ, θράσος, ἐλπίδος, νόσος. This contributes to textual cohesion or what Halliday & Hasan (1976) called texture.

σπλάγχνα, φρεσὶν, κέαρ are actual physical organs and θυμός means "breath" I think. Is there a theory behind this that assigns different functions of the mind to different organs? Quite a lot has been written on the subject in Homer, but I don't think much of a pattern has been found. Incidentally, it seems that in Homer φρένες is "lungs" or more vaguely "internal organs above the midriff" rather than the traditional "midriff".

Here σπλάγχνα at least seems very vague and abstract. In the NT I think σπλαγχνίζομαι meens "to feel pity".

C. S. Bartholomew wrote:
I wonder if the expression σφενδόνας ἀπ’ εὐμέτρου is another somewhat convoluted metaphor. The proper measure of the sling referring not to the sling itself but to the measure of what is thrown overboard, i.e., not all the cargo but just enough cargo. It would be a very indirect way of saying this but Aeschylus is capable of oblique expression. This would seem to make sense of what immediately follows about the house being filled to overflowing and the whole house not sinking.

Not sure what is pictured as being thrown overboard, the possessions or the πημονᾶς (suffering, misery, calamity, woe). Smyth's note quoted above appears to support πημονᾶς.

Quite an intriguing and oddly indirect metaphor inside a metaphor. Thanks for clearing it up.
I would also read πημονᾶς as the abstract thing analogous to the tangible χρημάτων κτησίων
in the metaphor; this family has seen its more-than-fair share of misery that it is
in much the same danger of "sinking" as a ship overflowing with acquired loot.

A new metaphor introduced with ἔπαισεν ἄφαντον ἕρμα, human fate is like a ship that sails into a hidden reef ... the following lines are difficult, not sure what to make of χρημάτων κτησίων something like "ones valuable possessions" but the LSJ gloss on κτησίων belonging to property leaves me in a fog. How can χρημάτων (goods, property treasures, heirlooms) be modified by belonging to property?

Maybe κτησίων just emphasizes that χρημάτων are actual physical possessions and the point is to make a contrast with ὑγιείας mentioned before? Smyth translates gathered wealth. I think belonging to property just means that this pair of words should be taken a bit tautologically, "property-like possessions", and for this I guess "valuable possessions" is one possible rendition.

R-T takes πρὸ as a temporal adverb "in advance" or possibly a preposition with χρημάτων "in defense of one's things"; but my idea was to make it a preverb with βαλὼν, making it a verb in tmesis.

Difficult passage indeed. I found also difficult to accept that ἔδυ (a gnomic aorist I guess) means "founder", because for me this verb means "to enter something", not "sink into oblivion". This verb is used with the sun and the stars with the meaning "to sink into the sea", "to set"; and LSJ classes this occurence in the same section as those instances - but the sun and the stars enter the sea only to rise again, not to perish.

The Loeb notes: "The ship is envisaged as having run on to the reef because it is too heavily laden, and as being refloated by jettisoning part of its cargo. It represents in metaphor a house that has become excessively rich [...] The "sling" is probably nothing more sophisticated than a large piece of sailcloth or the like, in which two men could carry heavy items of cargo, and from which they could throw them overboard with enough horizontal momentum to avoid fouling or damaging the side of the ship."

C. S. Bartholomew wrote:
I wonder if the expression σφενδόνας ἀπ’ εὐμέτρου is another somewhat convoluted metaphor. The proper measure of the sling referring not to the sling itself but to the measure of what is thrown overboard, i.e., not all the cargo but just enough cargo. It would be a very indirect way of saying this but Aeschylus is capable of oblique expression. This would seem to make sense of what immediately follows about the house being filled to overflowing and the whole house not sinking.

Not sure what is pictured as being thrown overboard, the possessions or the πημονᾶς (suffering, misery, calamity, woe). Smyth's note quoted above appears to support πημονᾶς.

Quite an intriguing and oddly indirect metaphor inside a metaphor. Thanks for clearing it up.
I would also read πημονᾶς as the abstract thing analogous to the tangible χρημάτων κτησίων
in the metaphor; this family has seen its more-than-fair share of misery that it is
in much the same danger of "sinking" as a ship overflowing with acquired loot.

Thanks Nate,

I really flying blind on this suggested reading of σφενδόνας ἀπ’ εὐμέτρου. Keep in mind that I am a language guy only, not a classics student. To remedy that situation a little bit I brought home from the local library 24 lectures on CD about Greek tragedy by Elizabeth Vandiver. I listened to the first eight lectures today. There are several hundred lectures of hers on Classical Greek literature and mythology available. It's fairly easy listening, about the right percentage of new information to what is already known.

I've had to slow down in this chorus for several reasons. The material is difficult. I do the basic work, transcription, preliminary lexical semantics, then I settle down to study the text in detail, syntax, semantics, metaphors, discourse analysis and everything else. This takes some time and some days the distractions of life make it nearly imposable to achieve the level of concentration required to do this sort of work. A life full of crisis isn't very compatible with doing close readings of Aeschylus.

Also been distracted by the Burnout of Christopher Dorner (see also WACO '93, MOVE Philadelphia 1985). But that is for another forum.

NateD26 wrote:I've only read Agamemnon in Hebrew once for a university course.

Well, I still haven't finished Agamemnon in any language... So if there are going to be plot twits soon, like, say, a major character getting murdered, don't tell me

I knew it was difficult, but I didn't think this difficult. If I had known, I would have first read it in modern language. I'm doing it the way I did it with Homer, Euripides' Trojan Women, etc.; but for Aeschylus it maybe wasn't such a good idea.

CSB,
This chorus is especially difficult.

Your working methods sound admirably structured. I often feel I don't have any method at all, at least none involving a pen and paper. I just read a passage again and again until I get it, looking up unknown words in LSJ. If I don't get it, I read a translation or two and read it again. I repeat until I can read the passage from beginning to end and everything seems crystal clear (Ok, quite an overstatement when we're talking about Aeschylus). Then I turn to the commentaries (if I didn't have to do it already before in order to get the meaning), maybe look up some etymologies and maybe some parallels (especially in Homer). I don't analyse the text in grammatical terms unless I run into a problem, i.e. if a grammatical analysis is necessary in order to find and understand an explanation in a grammar or a commentary. I'm not good at all at analysing a sentence grammatically. You said somewhere we should learn the language and not the metalanguage and you were right, but still often I wish I had the discipline not to suck at "grammar"...

Smyth: "And unless one fate ordained of the gods restrains another fate from winning the advantage, my heart would outstrip my tongue and pour forth its fears". Loeb translates analogously.

Is there any cue for taking ἐκ θεῶν with τεταγμένα, that is with the first μοῖρα, except that this is the only way that makes sense? Taking it nonsensically together with the preceding μοῖραν just seems more natural to me.

R-T has a lengthy discussion of these lines, which I'm too tired to digest now. I'll leave to later on.

R-T takes ἐκ θεῶν with εἶργε here, which makes sense to me (if you can talk about sense with this passage). They translate "But were it not that one appointed allotment, by the gods' workings, constrains another allotment from getting more than its due, my heart, outrunning my tongue, would be pouring out these matters" and they gloss "There is a divinely ordered pattern of justice bringing people like Agamemnon down; this makes it useless for me to give voice to my fears."

I find it especially difficult to assign the meaning "getting more than its due" to πλέον φέρειν, unless this is an idiomatic expression I don't know. (LSJ πλείων A II. doesn't give a direct parallel but it doesn't look impossible to me)

C. S. Bartholomew wrote:I'm wondering if the meaning and reference of ἐλπίδος is different on 999 than above. The use of ἐλπίδος for an expectation of doom might be somewhat of a shock to someone steeped in NT Greek where ἐλπίδος positive.

1044, Klytaimestra speaking, has ἐλπίσαντες again, this time in a more NT-like meaning. I don't know what this means if anything.

C. S. Bartholomew wrote:I'm wondering if the meaning and reference of ἐλπίδος is different on 999 than above. The use of ἐλπίδος for an expectation of doom might be somewhat of a shock to someone steeped in NT Greek where ἐλπίδος positive.

1044, Klytaimestra speaking, has ἐλπίσαντες again, this time in a more NT-like meaning. I don't know what this means if anything.

Paul,

οἳ δ’ οὔποτ’ ἐλπίσαντες
It looks like expectation would be a reasonable gloss here. ἐλπίσαντες is negated, so we have a scenario where things have not turned out according to expectation. It isn't perfectly clear what was expected but Smyth's translation ...

... or they who, beyond their hope, have reaped a rich harvest of possessions

... makes it sound like there expectations were of a positive sort. — I have not reached this point in the text (Thucy. 3.70.6 discussion!) — Looking at LSJ the expectations appear to get the positive/negative coloring from the co-text, the ἐλπίς word group being used in a neutral manner.

In the NT I haven't encountered a negative co-text where ἐλπίς is related to anything feared or dreaded. Louw & Nida[1] don't show any semantic domain that would support a neutral concept like expectation. Doubtless some English translation must have used that word for some instance of the ἐλπίς word group. But I don't think NT ἐλπίς is a neutral word.

C. S. Bartholomew wrote:οἳ δ’ οὔποτ’ ἐλπίσαντες
It looks like expectation would be a reasonable gloss here. ἐλπίσαντες is negated, so we have a scenario where things have not turned out according to expectation. It isn't perfectly clear what was expected but Smyth's translation ...

My post was somewhat unclear. I think ἐλπίσαντες has a somewhat positive sense here and that's why I called it NT-like. I think οἳ δ’ οὔποτ’ ἐλπίσαντες means "they, never even hoping for it" i.e. something "beyond reasonable hope" or "more than they hoped for".

I was wondering if there was something going on here on a larger scale, whether this ἐλπίς "texture" means anything.

C. S. Bartholomew wrote:οἳ δ’ οὔποτ’ ἐλπίσαντες
It looks like expectation would be a reasonable gloss here. ἐλπίσαντες is negated, so we have a scenario where things have not turned out according to expectation. It isn't perfectly clear what was expected but Smyth's translation ...

My post was somewhat unclear. I think ἐλπίσαντες has a somewhat positive sense here and that's why I called it NT-like. I think οἳ δ’ οὔποτ’ ἐλπίσαντες means "they, never even hoping for it" i.e. something "beyond reasonable hope" or "more than they hoped for".

I just checked back in LSJ for the ἐλπίς verb-noun word group. My speculation relative to a purely neutral sense in the earlier literature does not seem to be supported by the evidence. It seems that expectation is only one semantic component of ἐλπίς. Fear of or desire for the object of this expectation is not a notion that can be completely separated from the word.

Denniston-Page (D-P) parse the awkward protasis joining ἐκ θεῶν to the verb εἶργε, prevent by divine decree. I suppose that is possible. Lattimore puts it up front: "Had the gods not so ordained that fate should stand against fate..." and C. Collard appears to hang it on μοῖρα "... one man's status in life set by heaven preventing ... " which is similar to Smyth "And unless one fate ordained of the gods restrains another fate ... ." All three of these renderings avoid making ἐκ θεῶν an adverbial, though Lattimore might be understood that way since he opens up with a subordinate participle clause, a contextualizer of sorts. It looks to me like Lattimore makes ἐκ θεῶν qualify the entire protasis not just the verb.

These are the most literal translations I have on hand. The others were very free. When the going gets tough, the translation gets loose.